Everybody Do the Dance of Ignorance

What does it take to be a politician nowadays? What kind of person wants to get into politics? Is it simply a matter of wearing an off-black suit, with a pressed white button-up, and a cornflower-blue tie? Is it a matter of delivering a perfectly half-hearted smile while you debate some other monkey in an empty suit in order to maximize your profits from the corporations and make sure that your constituents don’t realize just how badly they’re getting screwed?

That might be it, actually.

Let’s call a spade a spade. Politics in the United States is a joke. Here we have a wholly ineffective two-party system that leaves no real room for progress as the two sides work tirelessly to ensure that the other side simply doesn’t get into office, all while simultaneously screwing the average American out of his or her hard-earned money and standard of living because the politicians would rather tank the dollar by allowing the Federal Reserve to print money like it’s going out of style, and take kickbacks from their corporate sponsors, all the while passing laws that erode our Constitutional rights and leave the middle class propping up this abortion of an economy.

Excuse me if I sound pissed, but I’m sick of these guys making six- and seven-digit incomes simply because they raised enough money to put signs on the side of the road. What happened to intellectual discourse in this country? When did that become a naughty term? You want to debate things like gay rights and religion in school? Well how about things that actually matter, like where my food’s going to come from when the dollar loses all value and becomes a napkin for fecal matter? How about what’s going to happen when the Internet is locked down and the Government has access to everyone’s personal data without a warrant? You won’t be able to fart and cough without Uncle Sam knowing what you had for breakfast. What about when the United States starts assassinating its own citizens using drone technology which they said they wouldn’t use on American soil, but then turned around and said psyche.

I don’t mean to sound like an alarmist, but anyone who thinks that the United States Government has their best interest in mind clearly has not been paying attention during the past decade. I suppose if things got really bad, however, I could always send my kids off to some factory to build toys for the countries with good economies. At least we’d have spare money, and the only thing I’d have to worry about at that point would be the little guys committing suicide in protest of poor working conditions. Well doesn’t that just sound lovely?

We are so intellectually screwed in this country that we actually look at a college degree with disdain. This is coming from someone, by the way, who never stepped foot on a college campus for any reason other than to meet women or get drunk. Yes, you can indeed turn out well and be successful without a college degree, but the odds are not in your favor. And I’m not talking some useless major like philosophy, either. I’m talking real-world-applicable stuff, and yet somehow a higher education is elitist.

The nerve of some people – actually learning! Why I never!

Have we lost our friggin’ minds in this country? Do you realize that major retailers usually give the customer what they want, not because the customer is correct, or because the store is being nice, but because the customer has a complete lack of capacity for critical thought and doesn’t understand the concept of personal responsibility?

Your stupid discount that you worked so hard for is a pacifier because you’d rather stand in a store, arguing over the warranty of a phone that you dropped in the toilet – a phone, mind you, that you don’t even make full use of, and all the while you’re complaining that your kid is hungry. Well excuse me if your stupid status symbol is more important than your kid’s health.

For the next month, I’m going to be living in a country where people need to fill their toilets with water from a well before use. This place gets electricity for about half the day – on a good day.

Are we all going to need to be that uncomfortable before we get our act together?